Amarda Shehu, What the University Is Now For, Amarda Shedu, Apr. 27, 2026.
There's a bunch of introductory stuff about how universities have conceptualized their role and how AI is forcing massive changes.
The difference between wealthy private universities and public universities:
The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the story of the credential, the ticket, the signal, the return on investment. The two stories were never quite compatible. They were held in suspension by an institution wealthy enough, slow enough, and culturally trusted enough that no one had to choose. Faculty believed they were doing the first thing while students were paying for the second. The institution measured itself by the first and collected tuition for the second. The gap between the two was absorbed by prestige, by endowment where it existed, and by a social consensus that the degree was worth what it cost regardless of the mechanism. The well-resourced privates can extend this hedge for another decade. The public access institutions cannot.
What the future holds:
If a job is a task that can be fully digitized, it is done. The tempo at which it is done is not in our hands. It is set by capital, by investment cycles, by regulatory response, by the appetite of firms for the disruption itself, and none of these are forces the family or the institution controls. No one can tell you which careers will be safe in three years or in ten. Anyone who claims to is guessing. The question parents are asking, what should my child major in, has been the wrong question for some time. The institution has been letting them ask it because answering the right one would have required a redesign the institution was unwilling to undertake.
What an education should provide:
The right question is what habits of mind, what kinds of relationships, what capacity for judgment under uncertainty, what tolerance for slow understanding, will let a person remain economically and humanly viable across a working life in which the specific tasks they were trained for will be repeatedly absorbed into machines on a tempo no one can predict. Some disciplines build these capacities better than others. Some build them well in some hands and badly in others. Some programs nominally in safe disciplines build none of them, and some programs in disciplines now considered doomed build them in abundance. The discipline name on the diploma is not the unit of analysis. The formation the student undergoes inside it is.
An ecology of growth and learning:
It is the formation of people who can do the work that resists automation, which is not the cognitive work the machines are absorbing but the judgment, the relational capacity, the slow understanding, the tolerance for ambiguity, and the practiced humility that emerge only from sustained encounter with hard things and with other people doing the same. This formation is not a curriculum. It is an institution. It requires faculty who are present to students rather than performing for them, advising relationships that persist over years, mentoring that does not appear in workload calculations, and a tempo of learning that the dashboard cannot capture and that the institution has been quietly disinvesting in for a generation because the disinvestment did not show up in the metrics it was tracking. The redesign is not a redesign of the curriculum. It is a redesign of what the institution treats as its actual product, and a willingness to charge tuition for that product honestly rather than for a credential whose market value is being revised in front of us.
There is more at the link.
H/t Tyler Cowen.
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